


Younger

by RocketRabbits



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Gen, I havent finished the game yet so this only talks abt the adventure up to the zora domain dont @ me, Link is tired, M/M, Second Person Present Tense, Sidlink is like pre-relationship, Takes place pretty early in the game, mostly angst, probably not canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 04:56:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19288579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RocketRabbits/pseuds/RocketRabbits
Summary: After a hundred years, you aren't sure you're what Hyrule needs.





	Younger

**Author's Note:**

> Hello i just started breath of the wild and i get so tired playing it i cant imagine how link would feel living it
> 
> Fic inspired by the Mountain Goats song of the same title from their new album In League With Dragons.

You wake up in a stone casket feeling like you'd never slept at all. Kicking chests open seems natural so you do, and you slip clothes on that fit you just right. The sun blasts down upon you when you exit your cavern, and you don't know how long you were sleeping, but it burns even with the chill in the wind. 

There are monsters here, ones you dodge and ones you whack with tree branches until they turn to dust, and you collect what's left, shoving horns and fangs into your bag like your life depends on it. You do not know your name, or how long you were sleeping, so for all you know, your life really does depend on it. You jab their loot boxes until they break and hoard the arrows left inside under the watchful eyes of an old, old man.

You find the ruins of an Abbey where an enormous statue lays waiting. you kneel and dig your only apple out of your pocket. You aren't all that hungry, and it can't hurt to give thanks to the local Gods. You sit for what you think is an appropriate amount of time wherein nothing happens, so you rise to your aching legs and stumble back into the blinding daylight. As you walk away, you wonder if that local Goddess once was yours. 

Your name is Link, you were asleep for a century, and you are the Champion of Hyrule. Everyone tells you this, every person you come across that knows the slab of rock that stays tied to your waist, making you slower, weighing you down. It identifies you, this slate, to people who remember you from before a century of sleep. Most believe you dead, until they see you, and disappointment floods faces you may possibly have glimpsed in your dreams (did you dream, during sleep? did you heal and wait and ache to come back to Hyrule? Surely you must have, and yet you don't think so) when you tell them you don't remember.They know your name, these people, other Hylians who you presume have changed so much in a hundred years that even with memory they'd be unknowable to you now. You learn about yourself through them, through the stories they tell you that feel more like prayers. You are reminded, constantly, of the ruined Abbey where you awoke, and you imagine that the statue of the Goddess would feel the way the slate does against your hip. You sign your apologies helplessly, but if they can read your hands, they don't acknowledge it. 

 

Paragliding is your favourite part of being alive. You climb mountains like you don't feel yourself grow tired, leaping from jutting perch to jutting perch with no regard to your protesting lungs until you scrape along the cliffside to the nearest flat surface. Even then, almost instantly, you straddle the rocks again and heave yourself toward the top until you make it there and take in the scenery before throwing yourself off in the direction of the nearest shrine. 

Often you don't land close enough, so you stalk the extra miles with scavenged weapon drawn and quiver full to the teeth. You like hunting the goblins that hold scavengers hostage, thrill at aiming an arrow just right at a Keese's eye, and in these moments you understand why you are a praised knight. It's in your bones, in your blood, in the way your declining health pounds in your ears when you singlehandedly ambush a clan, eyeing their boxes full of apples and arrows instead of where you aim your bombs. You understand why you are a praised knight, but you wonder if you were always so prone to blasting yourself off of guard towers. 

If it doesn't rain and the monsters have a cookpot, you linger in their fallen weapons, pockets ever bulging with wings and eyes and guts and fangs. In these moments in the open fields, you wonder how you are a praised knight. A deer crosses your path, and bile rises to your throat as you raise your bow, aiming for a quick shot right through the head. You know, on instinct, they won't run that way. 

 

You free a fairy and she takes your severed lizard and goblin horns in exchange for blessed clothing. You don't know what she does with the horns, but you thank each one as you hand them to her. It never hurts to acknowledge what had to be done to get you here.

 

The king of the Zora invites you into his Domain when you are battered and burned and begs you to remember his daughter. You start to sign your standard apologies when his son hands you armor, and if you were a prouder man, you would tell everyone you ever met that a king sung your praises and asked for your help, that his daughter planned your lives together, that his son thought of you as a legend, but you cling to the armor, so there is no room to move your hands. You wonder if you would have accepted the armor from Mipha a hundred years ago the way you do Sidon now, but that thought is stopped when they tell you of a beast over the mountain that will give you the necessary weapons to bring the divine machine to its knees. It had been a hundred years, and you have not rested in weeks. 

You destroy the Calamity inside the beast, and you weep at the spirit of a woman you barely remember. When it is over, you paraglide back into the city and kneel before the king, his tired son, your battered prince, looking proudly upon you at his side.

You like the Zora king, and his son, and what you remember of his daughter, so you only break a couple of their vases, and when you bomb the lake beneath the city, watching chillfins and hyrulian bass float to the surface, you do it when nobody is looking.

Sidon finds you by the cooking fire, leaning over the edge of the railing, chunks of deer and fox meat coming to a broil.

"May I intrude?"

You look at him, meet his eyes as best you can, and he rightly takes that as an invitation to lean beside you. "Thank you, again, for fighting the beast. You're a truly incredible ally to the Zora Domain, and a truly incredible friend to me, if I may be so bold."

You barely know him, and you almost tell him, but you clutch at the armor that his sister made you and he so tenderly handed you. Maybe you do know him. Maybe that doesn't matter.

I'd like that, you sign.

"My sister, Mipha," he says, "Did- was-?"

Yes, you tell him. She said she loves you.

"She loved you, too," he says.

I barely remember her, you sign to the water beneath you. I don't remember her or you or anyone. I'm sorry I disappointed the king. I'm sorry I couldn't help sooner.

"Link," Sidon says, and looks like he's going to rest his enormous hand on your wrist. He doesn't. You are thankful and resentful of the gesture. "He misses her. We all miss her. She was family and a warrior. You volunteered your help up a trecherous mountain to a family you don't remember, already scarred. No Zora minds that you have forgotten, Link. It's your passion that makes you honorable. You're wonderful. There's nothing to apologise for."

You don't tell Sidon how tired you are, how you slept a hundred years and would sleep a hundred more, how scared you are of sleeping at all. 

Thank you, you tell him, and you let your hand fall on his wrist.

You don't sleep that night, tucked away under the Zora Domain fishing, but still you dream of a small farm, and a cottage next to a lake big enough for a Zora to feel at home in, and for a moment, you are more content than you have felt in a century.


End file.
